Paul English: How He Built And Sold 6 Companies And Why He Believes Irritation Becomes Inspiration

i think a lot of people say it's hard because you don't have the edge you don't work as hard that's not true with me if you talk anyone works with me they'll say i'm working as hard now as i was during my first company when i blown through my four one k to finance it alright paul what's going on man will you da mesh cto c cofounder hubspot told us we have to we have to we don't we don't have to but we should talk to you what why did he say that i don't know it's gonna be connected i had a lot of fun talking together about technology philosophy and teams one fun thing that der i did going back many years ago now when i was cto a founder of kayak der and i kinda switched jobs for day so i actually had him made up i go ahead him an email address der domestic kayak dot com and made up business cards and he basically sat up my desk card for day and then i sat at hubspot for day and that was sort of the beginning of our friendship realizing realizing that we had some older overlap but some things we can learn from each other and he's been a great mentor to me on front and your big hit has been well so far you have a new company low which i don't know if you know this or not you guys advertised with my old company the hustle a bit so yep we work with you a bit but your big hit so far has been kayak right what did you sell that for like two or three billion two billion i've actually sold six companies a row including lola i've sold even another one after lola moon team which the podcast app and now i'm onto my seventh company which one of the with oh so which of the six has been the most financially successful for you kai was the biggest financial outcome which i'm deeply appreciative of and i learned a lot at cog some amazing people but there's other things which are also really significant that aren't just monetary so my first sale i don't have to i just told you i sold six in a row there's another one that i don't really count because it only was a company i created in high school but it's very meaningful to me making money in high school designing software and what were the six so i had a company called boston light we were an e commerce company let people set up storefront fronts a little bit like shopify like this was back twenty years ago we sold that to intuit i again vp technology different intuit then i had a company called which is internet security software i did that with my brother at english we saw that to trend micro i did a company get human dot com which has served customer search information to have a two hundred million people kayak moon beam the podcast player lola which is the business travel and spence and i forget one i think that's the list and so what's the like thought process so would did you start them all in kind of the same way where you were maybe scratching your own itch or you're like analyzing trends so like what's your process to come up with these ideas it's mostly scratching mount itch i'm gonna i go through a company by company the only one that wasn't my original idea was cardiac my c cofounder steve hoffman was one of the founders or and he had observed it orbit says seventy percent of the people that are search on orbit but then when they were done they opened a second browser and went directly united dot com rev buy the ticket and so orbit did all the searching for people but never made money and so steve based said i'm create a company where all we do is search and then if someone wants go united they click the link and we'll send directly united and they could buy it there and that was his observation we met by chance and within probably forty five minutes decided to sign up as c founders each put a million dollars into the original round of financing and then i very quickly owned it from our product standpoint i went i'm remember about spending an hour and ex anesthesia that night because ex speed was the market leader at that point and just going back the next morning saying this isn't gonna be hard because i looked at ex ex below where it was sort of seizure inducing there there's so much stuff going on the screen you put a million dollars in was that like a i'm i'm going all my chips on the table right now or was that a you know was that half your net worth was that a small bet for you you feel at that time was did that add some anxieties to the process i just sold come thirty million so i couldn't that the million wasn't that hard for me at that point my prior company sold a thirty i blew through my four zero one k to finance it so my my first company was tough financially to get it going but for kai i could had made some money so i could afford to help finance it why did you why do you sell your companies why not you know try to run them or have them exist under a management team that you you control for a long time like der right that money has been doing hubspot for forever yeah so kayak i did for ten years so that was my longest stint and we ended up taking a public two thousand twelve which is incredibly fun and then we sold it shortly thereafter the price on at really booking dot com which a parent company and i just frankly was bored i felt like i was editing the flight screen for ten years and i want to try something new and i'd had an unbelievably strong team at tech leadership at kayak so at that point i thought like i could sneak out without hurting the company because i had people at that point they could do ui they could do product they could do architecture so it gave me the freedom to try something new you you're kind of i mean you're you're kinda like an internet og a little bit i mean kayak one of the was like a pretty huge thing it still is huge thing but in terms of like internet exit it was it was it was early on in into in the game and you guys had a nice huge exit who are some of the people who are kinda like big shots and baller now that you got to know a little bit earlier on you mean to across the industry overall yeah because like dart has all these crazy stories where he's like you know i was an early investor in coinbase and i and i met the team and i thought well he didn't actually tell me this i'm just making i mean he did invest in coinbase but i'm sure there's like a story he's like i met this guy brian and he was like living out of a closet and doing all this weird stuff and he was a quirky guy and and i mean he just has met or i believe he was an early investor in dropbox as well and like he probably has all these interesting stories about some of these folks who are now like ty or big deal now but he was fortunate because he's a little bit older and was more successful than they were when they were just getting their things started that he got insight into these businesses do you have anything like that yeah so i met brian c at airbnb when they were financing in a billion dollar evaluation and i think they're net with a hundred billion or something like that and i met at the time like loving brian thought he was iconic and passion driven mission driven but i didn't see it how big gave me was gonna get i said this seems awesome for people one of strangers living looking in the house but how many people look at zac gonna be so i kinda missed a bigger picture there what was he like when you met him just get like he was right mean i've seen him talk my wife works there i totally agree i think he is an icon i think he's one of the best ceos out there he's passion driven he's amazing but what did you see i saw him as very serious and intense he was charismatic he'd listened well so we had a good conversation where he wanted me to give him feedback of the company because c was a much bigger company at that point and yeah just took him as very serious intense and charismatic yeah whenever you're like you're doing technology for like fifteen twenty years you just get this like crazy story arc or like you know you get to see people you can you see all these people that you're like alright i think this person's kind of amazing they might go on to do amazing things maybe it's this idea maybe it's the next idea are there any other stories like that of that you've seen because you've been kinda in the game for such a long time yeah so when we financed we calculated in two thousand and four we've really launched out a general catalyst in cambridge mouse and then we've raised money from mike mori at sequoia and every one day my c fund and i were working out of square office and mike morris said oh i wanted to use it a couple guys this is chad hurley and that's his c cofounder it but they were the founders of youtube steve i think yeah that's right and i remember you those guys in square office and like yeah these guys are like putting videos online i'm like yeah that's cool whatever i didn't see that one either i have i have some famous misses i mean i've been pretty lucky as an investor i think my eye is thirty point five percent over the last several years so i'm doing pretty good i've invested in sixty companies but i've missed some i missed snapchat i'm at one of their founders when they were financing at an eighty million dollar valuation that would have been a big outcome dropbox i'm at drew early on and that wasn't under the guys that me investing in them was really just networking but had i i thought dropbox gonna be plagued by security i'm still kinda shocked i used dropbox you know that they don't really encrypt your files and that a dropbox engineer if they're malicious to get at just your files yeah i believe that it's amazing that they're as big as they are and why doesn't anyone worry about yeah what have been what have been the for you said you've invested in sixty companies and you got this great ir what have been some of the hits so far one of the ones coming right now is pilot dot com i used and yeah that's an amazing company i met those guys when they were i was a judge at the mit hundred k competition and had a company called k place really exotic technology they could patch a linux operating system as was running so you don't have to reboot your servers they sold that to oracle i was part of you know i was the judge at that and they helped them win that competition and then i invested the next company z which they ended up selling to dropbox and then when they left dropbox create another company i basically asked if i can invest before i knew what they're working on so i wrote them a check before i knew what they were doing and that's a forty x xr i think i finance them i wrote a check as part of the round a thirty million dollar valuation i think their last valuation evaluation was like one point two billion or something but that's one that the founding team had the mojo so when you met them you just knew those guys gonna create something seriously they were intense high energy they laughed a lot they finished each other's sentences they just really enjoyed working together i also another a good return for me at twenty two x was ken show which is the competitor to a bloomberg terminal and i invested in yeah their cto o pete cr used to wreck at kayak can i knew him from kayak and i just knew he was destined to do great things and he that was a really a nice exit we we had this guy trunk work for us so trunk was an analyst at ken show and ken show is like this you know they're a startup still but like the stereotype the to me from an outsider they've kinda fit this like stereotype of like an up type financial firm and we found trunk working there and this guy trunk who works for us he's like the he's got he's a loud mouth like literally like he speaks so loud and he's full of energy and he was a writer for us and we taught him about a you know we like encourage him to use twitter now he's got like you know a million followers on twitter and we and we recruited him from ken show that's amazing i like ken because of that thank you and you so kayak was a big win and then you did things like let's say moon beam which is like you know a podcast discovery type of app could've have been big but you know maybe i think anything in podcast podcasting is is sort of like looks sort of niche and most of the podcast products even that win are sort of like you know really good lifestyle businesses so far there hasn't been that many big winners in the podcasting space in terms of tools are you do you i know one thing that's hard to talk to people who who kinda have an exit like seven hundred million or eight hundred million or a billion dollars it's like that becomes the new table stakes for the next thing they do some go that way and they said okay i gotta get a huge now and others are like no i'm literally just gonna program things in my house for fun now like now i i i i don't wanna go try to test lightning in a bottle again which way do you think about or is there another a third way i always said for each of my companies it's team for us customer second profit third i set it for kayak on day one we put together our culture plan and i really think it's a good way to execute because if you if you focus on becoming a phenomenal recruiter and really becoming a student of recruiting but read all the books listen to the podcasts learn from others to talk about recruiting and recruiting an amazing team and then figure out how to lead that team so that there's no stress in the office people work really hard are they fun at cranking stuff out but they're not stressing each other out if you do those things you can create i always say magic teams create magical products and then usually if you can create a magical product you can find a profitable business there so for me now after i sold lola my business travel and expense company i sold that to capital one a year ago i then opened up a venture studio called boston ventures studio it's b dot net and we have nine apps under development developments some of them are in itch to scratch like fun little things that we put out with source code others are a swing for the fence is really thinking become big there's a company i launched two weeks ago called deeds like show me the deeds that could be a billion dollar company what you saying online reviews are broken you know if you go to google right now in quotes you search for by amazon reviews you'll see this thirty seven thousand pages that tell you how to do that if you make you know these headphones i'm wearing if you make a competitive these and you wanna sell on amazon you can easily buy a thousand five star views for that if you want and these pay review companies are run by phd computer scientists they're evading amazon bot detection so it's very difficult at this point to have to to detect them they're going through proxy servers they have age accounts say buy products and then if you go to yelp or tripadvisor the reviews are largely by people you don't care about you know like i looked out a sushi restaurant out in new york and i saw five sour views of this place people talked about how great it was because it's really cheap and i don't know about you if you like sushi up but i'm not trying to be that excited to having ten dollars a person sushi new york that's little scary to me i went that catfish and cream cheese roll yeah if you go on you tripadvisor and you look for a hotel you'll see a lot of five star hotel five star reviews for motel six and that was great when i was twenty years old i'm not sure i would say a motel six now but a lot of you just don't relate to the person doing the purchase so the idea of dates is i'm gonna blow that up and say it's just the recommendations from your friends from influencers that you choose to follow and then using machine learning and doing book alike modeling to find people that are similar to you man it seems like you pick really hard industries like travel is like you know i'm again i'm an outsider you're you're the expert but it seems like notoriously difficult like it just seems like incredibly competitive and very very very challenging and the margins seems small very hard it seems to start one of those things now podcasting terribly hard i don't you know i don't entirely understand why it's so hard but like the nothing has entirely clicked to make it this this fantastic industry even though a lot of people use podcasts and then reviews also seem terribly challenging you know yelp has had like yelp hasn't innovated in and in five or ten years their stock sucks google reviews is is a is a horribly challenging person to compete with because you know they have all these people already using it what what's the game what's the game plan here and why are you picking the hardest things to work on yeah the origin is i i'm friends with some people who own restaurants in boston and i saw the difficult they had during covid and so it really develops some compassion for restaurant owners and they all told me how much they hey yell yelp is this like mafia where you pay if you they call gonna save a lot of bad views call us some pass hundreds of dollars a month that we'll sort clean up your site on yelp it's kinda like in italy there's a movie called billion dollar bully about yelp it came out in twenty nineteen and the opening scene is an italian chef who said when he opened his first restaurant on son broke the windows he fixed them they broke him in the next week he fixed them the next week some guy comes in and says i noticed someone keeps breaking the windows you've had a hundred dollars a week i'll make sure no breaks of windows anymore and he knew that was the guy who's was breaking his windows he's like yelp but just like that so i look at yelp because a twenty year old dinosaur that's the last twenty years we wanna be the next twenty years and i look at the evolution you know the world is different now than it was when the created for one the rise of the influencers particularly gen z they make all that purchase decision based on influencers and that's true now for dining so we wanna give it make it really easy red and scrolling through instagram and trying to find an old post of restaurant you saw a month ago having it in one tight really clean ui it's your friends it's your influencers and then on machine learning i'm really inspired by tiktok tiktok is an amazing app they don't ask any questions they don't say you know what do you what's your interest but if you look at my tiktok feed there's a lot of base players i'm a bad base player but i like base players there's a lot of dogs having a new dog this garden tiktok has figured out the stuff i'm interested in and without ever asking me question and the way they work is they don't even ask me to who your friends are they will find some you know dj and berlin was the same weird sense of humor you and it'll show you these are the videos she listens to that she watches so i really like that lookalike alike modeling or user clustering so we're doing that with dee as well we're gonna find your friends the influences you like and then people of the same taste as you this data is wrong every freaking in time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot girl at him do you think that starting a company now that you're wealthy is easier or harder than when you are just getting going in your career i think a lot of people say it's hard because you don't have the edge you don't work as hard that's not true with me if you talk in on works with me they'll say i'm working as hard now as i was during my first company when i was blown through my four one k to finance it to me work hard is recruit hard lead coach people get people excited and i'm working on that as hard as i ever have i'm trying to get a little bit better with each company there is some advantage having money at it if you see a stupid problem that cost five grand to fix you know when you're create your first company you don't have that five grand now you do so you just pay little money and problems go away what do you think sean easier or harder yeah i think it's different and you just have to like work with this the the pros and the cons right like yeah recruiting is easier and you waste less time on the on just like the rookie mistakes that you always make but then you know there is some diminish maybe of the edge or you know the things that made you successful the first time might have been that there was a technology wave going on there was a bunch of opportunity and like have to recognize new technology waves or new inflection points new things that have changed like you know he's talking about like basically machine learning has gotten a lot better and now we can do things that like make make the user experience way different if before we had to ask you fifty questions show you something good and now you could swipe three times four times and i could start getting you something good you know i can create a delightful user experience whereas before you know maybe i couldn't so i think yeah know i think it's different the things he's saying make a lot of sense to me but tell you i wanna thing about doing tech now versus twenty years ago i've been investing for a long time in addition to running companies and in the old days companies would fail because their product didn't work they just couldn't get a tech working that's hardly the case now like the stack the aws the tools the open source it's pretty easy to assemble the right libraries and write people to help put something together companies fill today if for one two reasons either there's a founder imp they create a talk to culture and people like hate their boss and they hate work and they're they'll leave which unfortunately happens all too often they they failed able the culture code or number two they built a nice product but it's a problem that no one cares about and unfortunately a lot of founders have an itch to scratch as he was saying earlier sam and they get really obsessed about it like i have this little problem i'm gonna working on it for ten years and they don't realize that not a lot of people have that same problem it makes you sad when i see that when i see a beautiful product it's solves a problem i don't care about it yeah do you see that all the time that's like the number one cause of death i think with a with startups you you sent something a second i wanted to to ask you about so you go become amazing at recruiting i that's never been something that i was like that's the thing i'm gonna set my mind too and you said you know i read all the books read i listed all the pie and try to become amazing at this so i can assemble teams to you know do your venture studio and you're pretty good at it though sean well i'm just like i don't know you ever know right like even whatever you know like it's like a belt system it's like even if i'm a blue belt there's still a black belt you know that i could go learn from even if you're a black belt there's they're like oh i'm i'm just there's lifetimes more to learn about this thing but i'm curious paul how would you summarize for somebody who's talented but hasn't put their focus on becoming great at recruiting what do you think are the give me like the the the eighty twenty this so the summary of what principles you think are most important when it comes to recruiting and what are there any that you wouldn't expect are they all just things it's like i wanna lose weight it's like eat healthy and exercise like okay well you know i guess that's true but it's not that hell not that helpful i kinda already do that are there anything things that are maybe counterintuitive or or nuance that that are important the main thing is just recruit all the time always always be recruiting and always be trying to connect with people and you might be going to you know a coffee social to learn about why crypto terrible or whatever and you don't realize that someone gonna be there that would be your next unbelievable cmo you weren't expecting to meet them but if you always have your spidey sense out for looking for amazing people and then once you see them do whatever takes to get them to come meet your team i have a little bit of an off color story which i probably shouldn't tell but someone asks he wants moment the strategy by the way that's the best starting of a story so i i i mean i like the worked down okay so someone asked me about my recruiting style because if you've been recruited by me you'll know that i'm like very very aggressive to do whatever it takes to get you i'll come you at a starbucks near you i'll do it is getting me meet my team i trained my team how they should behave and their first meeting with you and all that and the first in we can mind with someone ask you about this about why i'm so laser focused on getting these people is one time i was in seventh grade at boston latin in school and i was at my locker and this really cute girl walked by and my friend noticed me turned my head and look at her my friend said english don't even think about it she's dating the cap in the football team so at that moment that girl went in color and the rest of my role black way like i had to date that girl just my friends that i put in and i did end up dating her but it was just like when i recruit and i see someone amazing i'll always ask him like do you know anyone even more amazing than you at this is a funny japanese game show that is a guy in italy looking for the most beautiful woman in the world and when he encounters as the first beautiful italy he says dora do you know even want beautiful than you and that leads us kind of a hilarious succession of conversations but when i'm recruiting and i find some amazing i'll just do what it takes to get them excited and to get them to meet my team and i've always said that the first five people hire you the next fifty who hire you the next five hundred and it's one thing as a founder to convince someone to come meet your company but if you've been really good at recruiting that first five those five will close the candidate for you when they meet those five they'll say oh my god i need to work with this team you kind of have i'm i'm clicking around in your site you you and da are interesting to me because you guys have this like dry kind of almost nerdy sense of humor that i love so for example if you go to lola dot com it it basically says the domains for sale but you can see the history of lola by clicking here and it goes to pm d pm e that's u dot org and it's a website where it's like plain text you're just explaining exactly what happens and so that's kind of a an interesting way of like going about explaining the the the story but if you click paul english dot com it goes to your website and it talks about some of your cool investments and your your founder stories and things like that and then it says like all the clubs you're involved and and one of them it looks like either you started or you are part of the bipolar social club i was reading on your wikipedia it talked about like you know you had some issues with bipolar and i think that like the fact that you're part of bipolar or social club is that's i mean that's just like that's pretty funny you know i i'd like i'd like guys like you and da that's why i loved da he's a guy who's like you talk to him and you're like oh you're just a shy you're you're pretty shy then you start talking a little more and it's was like oh you might be like quiet but you're like you're kind of a killer and you're incredibly quirky for example he's got a new project called venn diagram dot com where it's a community for people who love venn diagrams and and then he has another thing called like word play or something like that where it's like a word you know game that makes like a hundred grand a month or something crazy like that he just has all these things you kind of seem like that are you a guy who's just constantly tinkering on on on stuff yeah i mean i have i own about three hundred domain names and every domain name has a google doc associated with the idea for the company i'm obsessed with brand and names and i'm and da i share this that we're prepared prepared to spend big money to buy a good name and i do i do i have a lecture a lot of universities and i give a lecture on where creativity comes from and i've done this everything we're from berkeley school music dartmouth film school right out in school design as well as the more traditional universities you would think about and what i do is let's say i'm teaching thursday at five o'clock at wednesday at five o'clock i'll the professor email with students and say take a picture of something tonight that annoys you not a picture you took yesterday not a picture you found on google but take a picture sometime which annoys you and then i of students about how irritation becomes inspiration and how any problem can become the motivation for product and we go through a very specific exercise about how to do that and i am someone who loves idea if you look at they say that you're the average to the five people you spend most of your time with if you wanna change your life change of people to spend time with you look at the people who i hang out with they care about nonprofit work philosophy and idea like improving things i just have a blast meeting with people like dumbass and saying how could we fix this how can we do this better well you're in the right spot so we well we started this podcast it was do what's doing alright maybe i don't know ten thousand people would listen to every episode so maybe like i don't know a hundred thousand in in a month something like that and it was a classic interview show similar what we kind of have done so far up till that would get to know you a little bit or it's like oh oh you built kayak amazing tell me about it you know how how'd you do it and i was just like every other tech or business podcast which is how would you do it podcast and then one day just to mix it up i was like i invited sam on i was like sam let's just shoot the shit like we do when we're not on a podcast about like oh have you seen this you know why does somebody solve this dude i tried to book this the other day was so annoying and we just started brainstorming and so we turned the podcast we called that one the million dollar brainstorm which is basically ideas that we don't have the time to do but there were ideas that we thought it could be like a million dollar billion dollar ideas and and so we started that's what we and then the whole podcast took off and so now it's like in the top ranks of the charts and all the stuff and it's i think because we switched into this like idea brainstorm mode and there's a lot of people like us that are out there the same way da is trying to find all the venn diagram out there all the vendors we're trying to find all the people that love to shoot the shit and brainstorm some ideas sounds like you're one of them so can you give us a couple of ideas or maybe from your domains you know pull three names and and and what's the what's the one line pitch you have in mind for for some ideas that you'll probably never have time to go do sure i'll tell someone that the itch was enough that i actually did a little bit of work on it so one of them was i live in boston but i also spent a lot of time in new york where i am today and where i live is kind of between west village tobacco near soho and i don't know new york that well like i know the those three neighborhoods but i don't really know like upper east side upper west side whatever if if i'm trying to meet someone on the upper west side i don't know what to meet i'm like this is annoying that there isn't a website where they can see if it where they are where i am pick a bar in the middle so i built and out it's called middle dot net i i bought that domain name at middle dot net allows you to have two people at three or four as many as they want it grabs a location from the browser and it shows you like a coffee shop bar to meet in the middle now i'm never gonna make any money doing that but i did it because i used know way to meet people in new york because i was getting used to the city i couldn't find a way to do it so i built it out another a one when you meet someone so i generally don't really like going go into conferences because i'm a little bit shy a little introverted i've i'd like learn how to be extroverted and i can say more about that if you care to hear about it but when you do go to a conference and you meet someone and you wanna swap info it's annoying to do it you know you gotta type in phone numbers and stuff better type in email addresses is so dumb or we can use this dot card thing but if to carry this card around this card around so i designed a little app called fun contact it's fun contact dot com and allows you to a sec a list of qr codes one qr code might be just my email not only might be my email my home address and based on who i'm meeting what information i wanna share them i just swipe through and show them the right qr code they scan it and i'm in their address block i built that because i needed it i don't think it ever become a company but i just wanted that so i built it how many people are using this the sixth cool i'll use it i was i just needed one of those things the other day it's super cool i used it last night oh do wanna hear a funny story yeah so last night it was my year anniversary with my girlfriend rachel and we went to san ambrose in west village for on our first eight three years ago and next to us was anne win you know who she is the of v magazine one of the top social rights in new york and bradley cooper on our first day at ne to last night was our three anniversary we go to the same restaurant guess who sitting in to us on a win that was super cool but at the end of the meeting i i did talked to her for a couple of minutes and then she left and on the table on the other side of me whereas for people work in the fashion industry when my girlfriend works and we really kinda bonded to talk about it i talked about the bipolar social club and the clothing brand i wanna create and then they asked my number and i just pulled out fun contact and i scanned it now all these young fashion people have my number and we've been messaging each of it today about bipolar social club that's great well it's the clothing brand you i create so bipolar i have bipolar illness i was diagnosed at age twenty five and it's a pretty serious illness you know a lot of people end up killing themselves ruining their marriage or their job or their lives and it took me a good ten or fifteen years to learn how to manage it for myself this bipolar one on bipolar two i'm by bipolar two so i'm not the most severe type the most severe type he has voice stand end up homeless and and or worse not that there's a lot of things for us in being homeless but bipolar one is pretty serious illness bipolar two still has problems but i only a years i learned how to deal with it and i want to be able to laugh off without be bipolar about the funny things about being bipolar so i created this video series if you go to bipolar social club dot org there's ten people with bipolar illness who kinda tell their journey and it's kind of des digitizing it it's saying yeah it's a mental illness and this shitty things about it thought there are some funny things about it too and i have to thing about bipolar people that if i'm a cocktail pride with the hundred people and is someone like in the other side of the room i can tell their bipolar like we recognize recognized each other my gay friends say they have gay they can tell gay people across the room i can tell bipolar people across the room and we're trying to do something fun who wanna have a clothing brand we're bipolar people kind of wear the brand the product like bipolar and proud so bipolar social club we want just sort of a fun name is there anything in in the travel industry that you noticed i mean because you had more data than you know there's probably only hundreds of people in the world or maybe the low digit thousands that are able to kinda see some of the things that you saw because of the scale of kayak and and the company that bought you guys were there any interesting problems that you felt weren't being entirely solved that you think could actually be quite large you know big businesses the problem with the travel industry is the thing i had the most trouble with is flights and the airports sent tsa tsa is a joke the stuff that do to you it gives you a false sense security but there's no real security with tsa that's irritating i wish someone would solve that and make something a lot more efficient and safer airlines are running on old technology they have to be very conservative because if they make a mistake and adopt something too new the plane will crash and most obviously they don't want that to happen so it's very archaic and old and i'd said earlier that i travel between boston and new york i never fly because by the time you go through tsa security and get an uber chen it's just it's often faster to drive so as far as things the in a travel industry i would like to see fixed i'd like to see someone that figured out how to work with all the unions who put all these requirements in who working on the airlines how to work with tsa how to make flying pleasurable it's not pleasurable now i also remember growing up when you go to the airport people used to dress up they would like really excited to get an plane to travel but now airports are just a nightmare and i wish someone could make airports pleasant and swine president yeah same it sounds like a the hardest thing on earth to do though what do you think about what elon is doing so elon buys twitter he's kind of taking this like you know technology first thing trying to change the culture overnight forced people back in the office lay bunch of people try to ship changes really fast seems a little bit held or sk have you followed that and i'm curious what's your opinion as a cto and somebody's doesn't tech for a long time i followed it quite closely and put me in the list of a thousand people who wanna create a twitter competitor right now i've spent a bunch of time in the last week rum on that and i think it's a bit of a shit show i think i always knew that elon musk was eccentric and i forgave him for some of his stupid stuff just because he creates such good products i love my tesla of cars i'm a happy tesla a stock from two thousand sixteen but when i looked at the way he fired people at at twitter it was just obnoxious just as fuck like do you really need you're are the richest guy in the room in the world do you really need to also be an asshole there no reason yet had to mark people out of the office and so i saw that i kinda of turned on a little bit and i said i don't like this guy having this much power he's trying to control he's trying to make it the main information source of the world controlled by the british person in the world i'm not very happy about that so i'm either gonna do you think he's gonna pull it off he does stupid things like the eight dollar gratification that was a joke but if he assemble smart people around him it it looks like the smartest people all have left what are already they've all run for the hills but he's gonna hire some new people in i'm sure there's some good people that are still there i'm trying to do some interesting things with it but i'm really looking forward to all the twitter replaced gonna come out it's hard to compete with an entrenched company that has hundreds of millions of users because even if your product is better does steven king really wanna tweet on sam dot com when it'll be you know a thousand followers as opposed to twitter world have right a million followers but i don't know i think you start stuff up and i wanna see the innovation that comes out that's cool yeah i i think that there's i think if somebody's gonna do it they're gonna have to come up with a a social innovation not a it's not a techno there's not a technical innovation so i have this kind of long running theory about social networks which is that every so social network is a change in privacy policy not a change in technology so like for example you know facebook was this privacy policy change where it was like instead of myspace this is only people that go to your school and at the door we gauge you with your your school email address there's a change in privacy policy that totally changed people's behavior because now you're more interested in everybody and you're more willing to share then as facebook became the norm than it became you know things like twitter which was like change your privacy policy you i don't have to accept your friend request for you to see my content it's like you could just follow me unilaterally you could just describe you could decide to get my content that was totally different than facebook then snapchat comes out and was like here's the privacy policy here all the shit self des destruction at twenty four hours sir right like in ten seconds whatever so content is not permanent here and so people flock to that and so there's just this ongoing shift of like the what is the like the social rule set that we're gonna follow on this thing and so what's interesting with twitter is if you're gonna compete with twitter now i think gotta do one of two things you gotta do it like kind of like ga or truth social trying to do but somebody could actually pull that off where they basically take a community of people that are pissed off about twitter and there's enough pissed off people to go into their own echo chamber i think that's possible and then the other one is i think if you created you have to turn the disadvantage into an advantage so instead of stephen king saying why do i wanna go tweet here when it's only i'm only i have a thousand followers over here you have to make it where it's now benefit like the perk is that there's only a thousand people there so it's like more like private or in invite only style communities that you can join that have the same content format as twitter something something like that i think is more likely to work than what people are trying today which is just we're twitter not owned by elon musk where we're decentralized twitter and it's like nobody cares it's a joke i think that's technology looking for a solution i think truth social was an epic failure the things that i care about on twitter right now is i'm bothered by all the trolls and the cruelty and you know i look at tiktok and i don't watch tv really but i use tiktok probably twenty minutes a day and i like how positive tiktok is and i don't know what the chinese are doing to filter out the trolls but it's also just it's young people like the average eighteen year old is like kinder than the eighteen year old you know where do you think that's true i one hundred percent think it's true i one hundred percent i think that like they don't make fun of each other in the same way that you and i used to make fun of our peers at eighteen twitter i mean tiktok is amazing someone wrote post a video themselves and they'll say oh my girlfriend just broke up with me and you know i think i'm very unattractive or there's something like really revealing awkward and the comments are just unbelievably supportive everything yeah it's just amazing so different than twitter and so like twitter competitor is create the kind twitter with there's no trolls there's no cruelty g and then also deal with the misinformation when you see a tweet that says covid vaccine causes autism like how do you smack that down and i'm very interested with those who rob it's getting rid of cruelty and flagging misinformation but doing it without filtering out independent info like there's a lot of places place in the world right now where it's scary to be publicly identified and to state your opinion and maybe even the us if you're the certain personal problems like some people might not wanna say they're bipolar because maybe that will hurt their career but i think this i think this there is a way to build something like twitter that is kind and truth oriented and i've haven't spent a lot of time in the last two weeks explain some but some other people also thinking about doing something new and i'm confident that there will be something there whether there's something that i help people with or something completely independent i don't know but somebody needs to create something better paul we i'm gonna ask you one last question before we have to move on to the next same segment with but what's your domain portfolio worth right now you think so i have three hundred let's say across me ten dollars each a year so i'm spending three thousand a year in domain fees i paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy domains i don't sell them at often because i still hold on to the idea that caused me to buy the domain so most i hold on occasionally someone will motivate me like a young entrepreneur is an idea for demand that i'm not doing anything with and i'll sell them to them i don't know i have some that are worth hundred thousand dollars some more and i have some that are just funny probably just to me so on well lola would be mid six figures how to imagine right look we paid five hundred thousand to buy lola we were in a bidding war it's it's up for sale again i it's up for sale because we sold the company to capital one they want everything to be capital one they didn't want the name lola so the name is for sale perfect buy back possibly okay amazing and where should people go find you i'm on your website i think your website's pretty cool you have like here's how i manage my time here's how i run meetings i love when people do that when they put their like operating playbook out there is that the best place to follow you or should twitter we're talk about meditation i talk about getting rid of pain and suffering i talk about getting rid of anger from your life it's just my name paul english dot com awesome well paul thanks for coming on appreciate it yeah we appreciate you doing this and i'm i'm i'm on your bipolar social club i don't think i have bipolar but i i still think it's a fun to file along the site ross thank you dennis and we appreciate you coming thanks a lot guys